Teaching English Communication to Non-English Medium School Students: A Learning Experience

Abstract

This paper highlights the experience of a group of college teachers who have been voluntarily teaching English communication to vernacular medium students in rural areas of Sivasagar district in Assam, India at their leisure time. The standard of the students varied from class IX to class XII. During the exercise of more than two years, it was found that a majority of the students lacked confidence in English communication. The ‘pull of the mother tongue’ was obvious which largely affected their pronunciation and natural flow of the target language. They were also not very conversant with the common sentences and phrases used in daily conversation, which is basically for lack of motivation as well as exposure to English in their daily life. It was also found that most of the time the teachers had to make them ‘unlearn’ few basic concepts of grammar such as parts of speech, tense, concord, and sentence structure etc in order to make them effectively ‘learn’ English communication. When we examine the teaching-learning situation in the Indian context, we see that both the learners and teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) usually have monolingual background – say for example, Assamese in the state of Assam. As teachers-facilitators of the teaching group, we took it as an advantage and used the common language, that is, Assamese as a ‘facilitating language’ to make the learning process easier. It was found that the mother tongue or the common language can be used as a natural resource for learning the target language, and it is best suited for the purpose and learning can become a fun activity too.